Thursday, December 18, 2008

I was hunting for rats in highsec. You don't do much else when you're only a few days old. As I warped into the belt, I saw a yellow Thrasher sitting there. I moved towards him while doing a background check on him, and saw that he was only a few months old. He was -3 and had a bounty on his head, so he'd been busy.

He turned and ran away, which I thought was curious. I was in a frigate and he was in a destroyer, AND he was a pirate in highsec... Why was he running away? I shrugged to myself, but my curiosity was piqued.

Checking the scanner, I saw he was still in range, but the only object within range was the planet that the belt was orbiting. Again, shrugging to myself, I activated the warp drive and sped off to the planet as well.

I came out of warp almost right on top of him. We looked at each other for a few seconds before I activated my target lock on him.

You never know if someone will be silly enough to shoot at you while in highsec.

As soon as he turned flashy red I activated my weapons and fired back, managing to get myself on the killmail. Suddenly his ship disappeared in an explosion as CONCORD came and punished him, and my Merlin frigate was at 40% armor. I sat there and laughed to myself, and in local I said, "Thanks for the loot!"

Turns out he was testing his ability to suicide gank with alpha strikes, trying to get as much damage output in a first strike. His testing had apparently shown him that killing anything bigger than a pod just wasn't going to happen in his cheap, expendable ships.